🇧🇷 Brazil · Northeast
Looking out over the Bahía de Todos os Santos, on a cliff that splits the city into two levels, Salvador de Bahia is the first capital Brazil ever had and the heart of Afro-Brazilian culture. Founded in 1549 by Tomé de Sousa, it was for more than two centuries the seat of Portuguese colonial power in the Americas and the main port of entry for enslaved people brought from Africa. From that painful, fertile crossing a unique city was born: the 'Black Rome', where candomblé, capoeira, axé, dendê cooking and a contagious joy fill every corner.
The tourist soul of Salvador is the Pelourinho, the historic centre declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985: the largest colonial architectural ensemble in all of Latin America. Its cobbled streets, colourful mansions, gold-covered baroque churches and largos (squares) are an open-air museum. Here you'll find the dazzling Igreja de São Francisco, the moving Igreja do Rosário dos Pretos —built by enslaved people—, the Terreiro de Jesus with the cathedral, and the icon that links the city's two levels: the Elevador Lacerda, the first urban lift in the world.
But Salvador is far more than its old town. It's the Farol da Barra and the most watched sunset in the city; it's the warm water of the beaches at Porto da Barra; it's the Mercado Modelo with its crafts; it's the syncretic faith of the Senhor do Bonfim and its coloured ribbons; it's the orixás of the Dique do Tororó; and it is, above all, a living culture that explodes in its Carnival —the biggest in the world with trio elétrico— and beats all year in its candomblé terreiros, its capoeira circles and its music. Few cities in the Americas embrace you this hard.
Long before the city, the shores of the Bahía de Todos os Santos were inhabited by the Tupinambá, who called that great inner bay 'Kirimurê'. The bay got its Christian name when a Portuguese reconnaissance expedition, with Amerigo Vespucci on board, sighted it on 1 November 1501, All Saints' Day. In those first years appears the legendary figure of the shipwrecked Portuguese sailor Diogo Álvares 'Caramuru', who lived among the Tupinambá and married Paraguaçu. The city was formally born on 29 March 1549, when Tomé de Sousa, the first governor general of Brazil, arrived with a fleet and King Dom João III's order to found a fortress city, São Salvador, as the capital of the whole colony. For more than two centuries Salvador was the capital of colonial Brazil and the largest port in the South Atlantic: through here entered the vast majority of the enslaved Africans brought for the sugar mills (engenhos) of the Recôncavo. From that suffering sprang an immense cultural legacy —candomblé, capoeira, syncretic religion, dendê cooking— that defines the city's identity. In 1763, by decision of the Portuguese Crown in the time of the Marquis of Pombal, the capital moved to Rio de Janeiro, following the shift of the economic axis towards the gold of Minas Gerais. Salvador went through centuries of relative decline, until in the 20th century its Afro-Brazilian pride was reborn: Carnival, the trio elétrico (invented by Dodô and Osmar in 1950), axé and the assertion of Black identity turned it into the cultural capital it is today. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The cradle of Brazil: this is where Cabral landed in 1500 and where Salvador was founded, the country's first capital for more than two centuries. The heart of Afro-Brazilian culture —candomblé, capoeira, axé— and of a coastline that runs from the Chapada Diamantina to the beaches of Porto Seguro.
Read the history of Bahia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
For more than two centuries, Salvador wasn't just another Brazilian city: it was THE city, the country's first capital, the largest port in the South Atlantic and the gateway through which the vast majority of enslaved Africans brought to Portuguese America entered. That double condition —capital of colonial power and epicentre of the trade in people— explains the intense, painful, culture-soaked city it is today. But to understand it you have to start much earlier, when there was neither city nor Portuguese.
The shores of the great bay where Salvador now stands were inhabited by the Tupinambá, a people of the Tupi family. They called that huge inner bay 'Kirimurê', which in their language meant something like 'great inland sea'. They lived from fishing, hunting, gathering and growing cassava, in villages spread along the coast and the islands of what would become the Bahía de Todos os Santos.
The bay entered written European history on 1 November 1501. That day, a Portuguese reconnaissance expedition —sent by the Crown to map the lands Pedro Álvares Cabral had sighted in 1500, and carrying the navigator and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci— reached the mouth of the bay. As it was All Saints' Day in the Catholic calendar, they named it 'Baía de Todos os Santos', the name it keeps today.
In those first decades of contact appears a figure half historical, half legendary: the shipwrecked Portuguese sailor Diogo Álvares Correia, known as 'Caramuru'. He is said to have been wrecked on the nearby reefs around 1509-1511, surviving among the Tupinambá, who named him after a fish that lived among the rocks. Caramuru joined Indigenous society and married Paraguaçu, the daughter of a local chief, later baptised Catarina. His story, a mix of fact and myth, stands for the first encounter —unequal and violent, but also a mixing— between the Tupi and Portuguese worlds on these shores.
The city of Salvador was formally born on 29 March 1549. That day a Portuguese fleet under Tomé de Sousa, appointed by King Dom João III as the first governor general of Brazil, reached the Bahía de Todos os Santos. He came with six vessels —naus, caravels and a brigantine— and a threefold mandate: to be captain of the bay region, governor of the captaincy of Bahia and, above all, first governor general of all the captaincies and lands of Brazil.
His mission was specific: to found a fortress city to serve as capital and seat of Portuguese government in the colony. The new city was called São Salvador da Bahía de Todos os Santos, and it was built to a design by the architect Luís Dias, on a cliff overlooking the bay. That geography explains the city's character: it was conceived on two levels, following the Portuguese model of a city on an acropolis. The upper part (Cidade Alta) held the administrative, religious and residential functions; the lower part (Cidade Baixa), by the water, the port and the trade. That duality still marks Salvador today.
With Tomé de Sousa came the first Jesuits too, led by Father Manuel da Nóbrega, who settled in what would become the Terreiro de Jesus and began the work of evangelisation and education. For more than two centuries —from 1549 to 1763— Salvador was the capital of colonial Brazil, the political, administrative, religious and commercial centre of Portugal's largest colony in the Americas. It was, in many senses, the country's first great city.
Salvador's colonial splendour was built on the sugar economy and on slave labour. In the Recôncavo —the fertile region ringing the Bahía de Todos os Santos— the engenhos (sugar mills) multiplied, and to keep them running the Portuguese imported an enormous number of enslaved Africans. For centuries, Salvador was the main port of entry for enslaved people in all of Brazil: hundreds of thousands of Africans passed across its dock, brought above all from the Guinea Coast, the Gulf of Benin, Angola and the Congo, from Yoruba, Fon and Bantu peoples.
Out of that suffering came, paradoxically, one of the richest cultural legacies in the Americas. To survive, Africans and their descendants rebuilt and reinvented their spiritual traditions in candomblé, a religion that worships the orixás —the deities of nature— through drums, songs and dances. Since the Church and the Crown persecuted these practices, the faithful turned to syncretism: they linked each orixá to a Catholic saint (Oxalá with the Senhor do Bonfim, Iemanjá with the Virgin, and so on) so they could keep practising their faith under a Christian appearance.
Slave resistance also gave birth to capoeira, that mix of martial art, dance and game that Africans developed as a form of fighting disguised as dancing, to the rhythm of the berimbau. And the African legacy soaked into everything: dendê cooking (acarajé, vatapá, caruru, moqueca), the music, the rhythms, the language, popular religion. That's why Salvador is known as the 'Black Rome': it's the country's greatest centre of Afro-Brazilian culture and the city with the largest population of African origin outside Africa. Even its most beautiful architecture hides that history: the Igreja do Rosário dos Pretos was built by enslaved people themselves in their free hours, over almost a century.
In 1763, after more than two centuries as capital, Salvador lost its rank as the centre of colonial power: by decision of King Dom José I of Portugal, the capital of Brazil moved to São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro. It was an enormous blow, symbolic and practical, for the city that had been the country's first and foremost.
The reasons were several and they combined. The main one was the shift of the colony's economic axis: through the 18th century, wealth had moved from the sugar of the northeast to the gold and diamonds of Minas Gerais, in the centre-south. Rio de Janeiro was the better-placed port for channelling that mining wealth to Portugal, which made it strategically more logical as capital. Add military reasons —Rio made it easier to support Portuguese forces in the disputes with Spain over the south of the continent— and the administrative logic of the moment, shaped by the reforms of the powerful Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the future Marquis of Pombal, secretary of state seeking to rationalise the running of the empire.
With the loss of capital status, Salvador entered a long period of relative decline and of lost national prominence, though it remained an important Brazilian city and the largest in the northeast. It lived through key episodes of the country's history —such as Bahia's independence, on 2 July 1823, a date still celebrated as one of the region's most deeply felt— but its colonial shine was slipping away. Much of the heritage in the historic centre we admire today was left, for a long time, abandoned and decaying, until the restoration efforts of the 20th century.
If the 18th century and much of the 19th were a political decline, the 20th century brought Salvador's rebirth from its greatest strength: its Afro-Brazilian identity. The city reinvented itself as Brazil's cultural capital, and its Carnival became the stage for that transformation. A key moment was 1950, when the musicians Dodô and Osmar invented the trio elétrico: a truck fitted with a powerful sound system and a stage on wheels, which revolutionised the party by letting the music 'walk' through the streets and pull in crowds. From then on, the Carnival of Salvador grew into the biggest popular festival in the world, with millions of people and a Guinness record as the largest carnival with trio elétrico.
Out of that mix came axé, the Bahian musical genre blending Afro-Brazilian rhythms with pop; the word 'axé' itself comes from Yoruba and means energy, strength, good vibes. But Carnival was also, above all from the 1970s, a space for asserting Black identity. The blocos afros appeared, such as Ilê Aiyê (founded in 1974), and groups such as Olodum, which proudly claimed African roots, Black aesthetics and Black history, in dialogue with the movements for civil rights and against racism.
Today that living culture is Salvador's greatest wealth and what makes it unique in the Americas. Candomblé is still present in hundreds of terreiros —some, such as the Casa Branca, listed heritage—; capoeira is taught and played in the squares; dendê cooking defines the Bahian table; and Afro-Brazilian music, dance and religion set the everyday pulse. The city that was the port of the pain of slavery became, over time, the great capital of Black culture in Brazil: the 'Black Rome', proud of a legacy it turned into art, faith and joy.